Demand for bandwidth has continued to grow as the military has developed more data-intensive weapons and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance systems. However, scarcity/limitations on both military and commercial communication links and additional bandwidth required to transmit streaming video from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or satellite sources has limited dissemination of such information, especially to the lowest echelon forces. As the availability of strategic surveillance video expands, the need to effectively distribute such information to the forces needing to use it will grow exponentially. It is unlikely that the bandwidth to transport such information can keep pace.
Presently, only one channel of UAV video requires bandwidth in the megabit per second range. Couple this with the enormous bandwidth consumed by the GLOBAL HAWK drone, and demand for bandwidth stands as a major barrier to beaming this timely intelligence information to US ground, air, and naval units for planning and direct military support purposes. In addition, the viewing of current analog collection video is time consuming and labor intensive, especially in retrieving past information, which can require lengthy serial searches of data tapes. Furthermore, the conventional method of viewing the earth through a narrow field of view sensor (equivalent to looking out an airplane window with a soda straw) does not provide a geographic context (e.g., “Where am I?”, and “What's ahead?”).
Similar problems arise in other operations that could take advantage of timely distribution of video information to personnel in the filed, such as distribution of surveillance video to police and homeland security operatives.
A need exists for an enhanced technique for providing solutions to these problems. Specifically, there is a need to provide wide dissemination of tactically useful portions of surveillance video to the particular users in the field who need relevant portions of the video information. Any such solution should provide near real-time distribution of the information yet require minimal bandwidth on the links to the end users. The distribution system should offer intelligence to military forces or other users operating round-the-clock, anywhere on the globe. Also, the solution should be readily adaptable to virtually any user terminal equipment and/or user communication capability available in the field.